ArticleFrontiers in neuroscience2020
Effect of Expectation on Pain Processing: A Psychophysics and Functional MRI Analysis.
Article in Frontiers in neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Perspectives on Pain: A Narrative Review of Pain Beliefs, Coping, and Clinical Implications.Journal of pain research · 2026Review
- Reframing Chronicity in Research and Care: A Patient-Informed Framework of Pain Adaptation.Journal of pain research · 2026Article
- Temporal changes in cortical sensory processing during the transition from acute to chronic low back pain.Pain reports · 2025Article
- Sex differences in pain perception and modulation in the brain: effects of insular cortex stimulation on chronic pain relief.Brain communications · 2025Article
- Placebo and nocebo effect in pain.Handbook of clinical neurology · 2025Review
- From taboo to treatment: The emergence of psychedelics in the management of pain and opioid use disorder.British journal of clinical pharmacology · 2024Review
- Counting your chickens before they hatch: improvements in an untreated chronic pain population, beyond regression to the mean and the placebo effect.Pain reports · 2024Article
- Re-examining the Mysterious Role of the Cerebellum in Pain.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Review
- A new role for spinal manual therapy and for chiropractic? Part II: strengths and opportunities.Chiropractic & manual therapies · 2024Article
- Technology supported High Intensity Training in chronic non-specific low back pain (the Techno-HIT trial): study protocol of a randomised controlled trial.BMJ open sport & exercise medicine · 2024Article
- Function and biochemistry of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during placebo analgesia: how the certainty of prior experiences shapes endogenous pain relief.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Diffusion tensor imaging reveals sex differences in pain sensitivity of rats.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2023Article
- Temporal-spectral signaling of sensory information and expectations in the cerebral processing of pain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Electrophysiological indices of pain expectation abnormalities in fibromyalgia patients.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Brainstem Mechanisms of Pain Modulation: A within-Subjects 7T fMRI Study of Placebo Analgesic and Nocebo Hyperalgesic Responses.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
- Investigation of the neural basis of expectation-based analgesia in the human brainstem and spinal cord by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging.Neurobiology of pain (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
- Exploring the hypothetical role of cerebellar pain prediction errors in fibromyalgia-associated chronic pain.Frontiers in neurologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Pain is a complex phenomenon that is highly modifiable by expectation. Whilst the intensity of incoming noxious information plays a key role in the intensity of perceived pain, this intensity can be profoundly shaped by an individual's expectations. Modern brain imaging investigations have begun to detail the brain regions responsible for placebo and nocebo related changes in pain, but less is known about the neural basis of stimulus-expectancy changes in pain processing. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we administered two separate protocols of the same noxious thermal stimuli to 24 healthy subjects. However, different expectations were elicited by different explanations to subjects prior to each protocol. During one protocol, pain intensities were matched to expectation and in the other protocol they were not. Pain intensity was measured continuously via a manually operated computerized visual analogue scale. When individuals expected the stimulus intensity to remain constant, but in reality it was surreptitiously increased or decreased, pain intensity ratings were significantly lower than when expectation and pain intensities were matched. When the stimulus intensities did not match expectations, various areas in the brain such as the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), and the midbrain periaqueductal gray matter (PAG) displayed significantly different patterns of activity compared to instances when stimulus intensity and pain expectations were matched. These results show that stimulus-expectancy manipulation of pain intensity alters activity in both higher brain and brainstem centers which are known to modulate pain under various conditions.
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